The R9 380X is AMD's new mid-range offering. According to the reviews it is about 12-19% faster than the GTX 960, but it can't compete with the GTX 970. There's not much more to say. It is just a R9 390 with slower clocks, fewer unified shaders, fewer texture mapping units, fewer render output units, half the RAM and half the memory bandwidth.

Have you seen this? Have you heard about this? Nvidia announced some great new updates to its GeForce Experience Beta yesterday. If you have a powerful desktop and the Shield TV you can now play your PC games at 4K, 60 FPS and with 5.1 surround sound. You can now stream on YouTube Live's gaming channel at 1080p and 60 FPS and they have upgraded the Twitch streaming quality from 720p/60 FPS to 1080p/60 FPS.

I will definitely try some YouTube streaming out once I finish building my new PC. Why not Twitch? Well I don't have a Twitch account, but I do have a YouTube account. In fact, I think GPUReview has a YouTube account. I should look into that.

Yep. I am very excited about Fallout 4. I managed to pre-order a PC Pipboy Edition from Amazon, it gave me a firm date that I need my new PC put together by (November 10th) and because I am building a new PC again, I am more excited about bringing this site back to its former glory.

60 of the games are free to play during the first 3 months then after that you are paying $7.99 a month to play those free games and any games that you purchased. When you purchase a game on GeForce Now, you get a steam code for the game so that you can also play it on your own PC.

I have a friend that owns a portable GeForce Shield. If his WiFi router is fast enough, we may be able to try out GeForce Now. I will let you know how that goes.

That Superlatives tab up above this post will take you to our superlative page. That page has been updated to tell you which video card has the most power in 8 price brackets that range from $0 to unlimited dollars. Right now AMD and Nvidia each have 4 cards in our superlative list.

Nvidia has finally done it! They have managed to put a complete desktop GPU into some notebooks. This GTX 980 notebook GPU has the same memory bandwidth as the desktop GTX 980, the same amount of CUDA cores, the same memory speed and the same memory interface width. Here is a table which compares the desktop GTX 980, the notebook GTX 980 and the GTX 980M.

Back when this site was in full swing (doing reviews, getting lots of visits, writing up articles and news stories) I attempted several times to reach out to AMD about the possibility of covering their products. I managed to get a few business cards from their reps at PAX or CES, but I never heard back from anyone that I contacted. Now it seems that well-known and well-respected sites like [H]ard|OCP, The Tech Repot and TechPowerUp are being denied review samples of AMDs new Radeon R9 Nano video card.

AMD and Nvidia are not required to send free samples to anyone. They do it because a huge amount of their customers decide what to purchase by reading reviews and articles from websites that are trusted by their readers to tell them the truth. I think at least 90% of these sites are completely unbiased. It wouldn't make a lot of sense for them to lie to their readers by comprimising the integrity of their tests because it is very likely that their readers would catch on very quickly. Hell, we got some flack from readers for not comparing Nvidia cards to AMD cards in our reviews. They thought we were biased but in reality we were just trying to do the best with what we had (which was free Nvidia cards and not enough money to buy the competing AMD cards).

So What's Going On?

AMD executed a paper launch of the Radeon R9 Nano on August 27th. [H]ard|OCP and The Tech Report were skeptical about the fact that this was a paper launch, about AMD's Nano performance claims and about the price. However, TechPowerUp didn't say a damn thing in its paper launch article that AMD could find objectionable even though some of their commenters were not very kind.

Then on September 4th TechPowerUp posted an article stating that they were looking forward to testing the Nano but that they wouldn't be getting one because AMD told them that it had too few review samples for the press. TPU used an entire paragraph to talk about how great their reviews are (which is true, they are awesome) and their last paragraph shows that they are disappointed that AMD's Fiji line is not getting the promotion it deserves from AMD. TPU doesn't sound mad, just disappointed that AMD is dropping the proverbial Fiji ball.

On September 9th [H]ard|OCP posted a scathing article about AMD's Roy Taylor and some of his "bullshit" answers to Kyle's questions. Roy also made some statements on Twitter that insinuated that The Tech Report and TechPowerUp do not write "fair" reviews and Kyle called him out on it which brought it to The Tech Report's attention. In his article Kyle talks about Roy's bad judgement, praises him for his work on Nvidia's "The Way It’s Meant To Be Played" initiative and then wraps it up with quotes from a consumer that believes that Roy is PR poison for AMD. On The Tech Report side, Scott seems pretty offended and hurt (not angry) that AMD thinks that their reviews are no fair. He even updated his article to tell us that he spoke to Roy on the phone and that even though he seems like a decent guy, he think Roy's personality is "too-strong".

So What Now?

I think Roy either needs some additional PR training before he is allowed to speak for the company again, or he should just be moved to a different position. There does seem to be some good news on the Radeon horizon. For the first time since AMD bought ATI, it is giving the responsibility of their graphics division to one man, Raja Koduri. It seems like Koduri has been making some good decisions and even Kyle says that he is the right man for the job. Let's all hope Kyle is right about him because (according to analysts) AMD has only 20% of the discrete GPU market right now. If their market share gets much lower, we could end up with a GPU monopoly that is dominated by Nvidia. Just in case you didn't know, monopolies are bad because once Radeon is dead, Nvidia won't need to improve their product and they can charge much higher prices.

I just wanted to pop in and let you all know that I have added all the GTX 960 cards that I could find and that I will be adding the reviews later today. Once I get all the missing Nvidia cards added I will move on to the missing AMD cards.

Right this minute there are only a few places to purchase the new GeForce GTX 950 so, I thought I'd throw together a quick list for you all. Oh and I will be adding GTX 950 cards and reviews to the site very soon.

Newegg

Newegg has at least 4 GTX 950's in stock, but I can only find them on this page because Newegg hasn't indexed them in their search yet. Here we have:

Most of the details about the GTX 950 leaked online right before the digital press presentation held on Tuesday at 3:00pm Pacific. What wasn't leaked was the price ($159 for the basic models) and the news that the GTX 950 is the first card that Nvidia has optimized for playing MOBAs.

When playing MOBAs it is very important for your clicks to result in on-screen action as soon as possible. The time it takes for a mouse or keyboard click to begin an action on the screen can be called input latency or responsiveness. In order to make the GTX 950 (and soon their other GTX 900 cards) appeal to MOBA gamers, Nvidia reduced the response time by rendering faster and making some latency optimizations. For example, the GTX 650 had an 80 millisecond (ms) response time in DOTA 2 and the new GTX 950 has a 45ms response time after DOTA 2 has been optimized in the GeForce Experience software. That is quite the improvement.

It only takes one click to optimize your game in order to obtain this faster response time. On the GeForce Experience page for your game there is a green Optimize button below the game's setting list and to the right. Just click that button and you are ready to reap the rewards of a faster response time in your MOBA game.

GeForce Experience Updates

Some of the features may have already existed in some form (I haven't used any of them yet), but I think Nvidia improved them and that is why they took the time to mention them in their press briefing. We will all be able to try out these new features in a "Share early access beta" next month.

There are 4 modes that allow you to record and/or share your gaming footage. Instant replay keeps the last 5 to 20 minutes of gameplay for you so you can review it, save it and share it. Record allows you to record game footage at a maximum resolution of 3840x2160 (4K) at up to 60 frames per second.

The Gallery is new for the Share beta. It allows you to view saved clips and then upload them straight to YouTube without exiting your game. You can also edit your clips before you upload them. You will be able to adjust your recording settings while in your game or while on your desktop.

There is also a new Broadcast overlay which allows you to add a camera or voice chat to your video stream before you begin your Twitch stream.

The newest mode is the GameStream Co-op. It allows you to share your game with one other person over the Internet. You will (of course) be able to use voice chat with your friend during your stream. It should be noted that GameStream Co-op will automatically shut off after 1 hour. The time limit may change in the future depending on demand and other factors, but this feature is not meant to allow you to stream or play co-op with your pal all day long. You can use GameStream Co-op in the following ways:

Your friends can simply watch you play in a low latency 1:1 stream.

Take control of your game with mirrored controls to help you find something or beat a tough part

I should also mention that Nvidia is doing its best to make GameStream Co-op secure. They stated that the stream will shutdown if your game is not running in full screen mode. That way, the other person can't minimize your game and take control of your PC. The only instructions that your co-op player should be able to send to the game on your PC is controller input. Now that I think about it, I hope Nvidia has thought of a way to prevent someone from deleting your game's save files. I think I'll ask them about that.

Check out this article on Nvidia's site for screenshots and a video about these new GeForce Experience features. That article also tells you to "stay tuned" to this site (which doesn't exist yet) so that you can download the early access beta next month.

I decided to visit the site today and consider adding the GTX 980 Ti to the site and I noticed that my last news post was made 1 year and 1 day ago. Not a lot has changed unfortunately. At least iwhen it comes to this website. I just moved into my first house with the woman I intend to marry. So right now I am focused on making repairs and updates to my house.

I still think it would be fun to fully own this site and get it up and running again. I really hope that happens, but I need to do more than hoping. I need to get motivated and get it done!

I will attempt to share what I do know with anyone who is reading this.

A long time ago Mike Thomas (this site's creator) passed over the keys to this site to me and my friend Don Hiles. What he was not willing to give us was the domain name, which I understand because there is some value attached to it. Since the site is still here I guess that means that he is still paying to keep the site hosted. I don't know anything about website coding, hosting or the expiration of domain name registries because I really lack the drive to learn about it. I leave matters like that to Don Hiles.

The last I heard, Don is still working on trying to improve and fix this site with the assistance of a few people. I am not sure how much progress has been made and I am not sure if this site will ever come back to life in a meaningful way. I will ask Don to write up a progress report so that I can post it here on the site.

Also, due to my neglect this site's forums became COMPLETELY overrun with spammers a long time ago. When I finally noticed how bad it was, I disabled posting from anyone but me (because all the forum mods and regulars were gone and the only people posting were spammers) and I tried to get rid of all the spam posts while also banning the IP addresses of each spammer account. Well each spammer account had so many posts that when I tried to delete all the posts from a single account the deleting process would run for a minute or two and then it would crash because there were too many posts to delete. Personally I think that the forums as they are now should be nuked from orbit after I try to save the really old on topic threads that still exist.

If Don and his team end up succeeding in bringing this site back to life, I will probably start posting news and adding new video cards to the database. Wouldn't that be something?

Today is the debut of Nvidia's 700 series of desktop graphics cards, and as usual they are starting things off with their high-end offering, the GTX 780. What is unsual is that this new card is not the fastest consumer video card that Nvidia is selling. The GTX 780 is just a GTX TITAN with fewer texture units, half the memory and less CUDA units. The GTX 780 ($649) may be similar to the GTX TITAN ($999), but it is priced closer to the GTX 680 ($450).

I will be adding retail cards and reviews to the site throughout the day.

Today is the day that the full reviews for the GTX TITAN come out. I found 12 reviews and 9 different retail cards so far, and I will add more or both as I find them. It looks like some of these reviews have some overclocking data, so I may start getting our patented overclocking roundup together.